I love to read

I snagged this from Marji’s blog. It’s is originally from UK’s The Big Read where they assume most people will have only read about 6 of the 100 books listed. Ha.

I say the folks at The Big Read need to have their heads examined since they have The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, and ALL the Harry Potter books listed as one title apiece. I say The Big Read needs to look up the meaning of the word "book" in the dictionary.

Instructions:

1. Look at the list and bold those you have read.

2. Underline those you intend to read.

3. Italicize the books you LOVE.

Put this list on your blog so that we can track down those people who have only read six and force books upon them.

1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

2. Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkein (Didn’t like it)

3. Jane Eyre -Charlotte Bronte (the world would be a better place if the Brontes had not been given access to pen and paper)

4. Harry Potter series - J.K. Rowling (Couldn’t get into them at first. Like them better now. The movies helped)

5. To Kill A Mockingbird - Harper Lee (I can hear this outloud in my head when I read it)

6. The Bible

7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte (see #3 above)

8. Nineteen Eighty-Four - George Orwell

9. His Dark Materials - Phillip Pullman (Marji has it on her to-read list, so I thought I’d give it a shot)

10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens (He was paid by the word and it shows. At least he avoids the inmate "very, very, very, very" when counting out words.)

11. Little Women - Louisa May Alcott (loved Alcott when I was little. Not so much now.

12. Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy (Poor Tess.)

13. Catch 22 -Joseph Heller

14. Complete Works of William Shakespeare (I still say this is cheating)

15. Rebecca - Daphne du Maurier (Marji’s mother recommended this book when I was about 16. I like most everything du Maurier wrote, especially House on the Strand.)

16. The Hobbit - J.R.R. Tolkein (Didn’t like it)

17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks

18. The Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger (I hate this book.)

19. The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger

20. Middlemarch - George Eliot (I never liked the sound of these words)

21. Gone With the Wind - Margaret Mitchell (What was in Rhett’s head?. Stupid Scarlett. Weak Ashley. Poor relation Melanie. That bunch had Brittany Spears/Anna Nicole Smith written all over them.)

22. The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald

23. Bleak House - Charles Dickens (Dickens-still sucking all the words out of the universe)

24. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy

25. The Hitchhiker's Guide to Galaxy - Douglas Adams

26. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh

27. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

28. The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck

29. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll ( Disney has a lot to answer for)

30. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame (Better book than a ride)

31. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy

32. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens (word, word, word)

33. Chronicles of Narnia - C.S. Lewis

34. Emma - Jane Austen

35. Persuasion - Jane Austen

36. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe - C.S. Lewis (Isn't this part of #33?)

37. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini

38. Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis de Bernieres

39. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden

40. Winnie the Pooh - A.A. Milne (Walt, Walt, Walt)

41. Animal Farm - George Orwell

42. The DaVinci Code - Dan Brown

43. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez (I’d like some of that)

44. A Prayer for Owen Meany -- John Irving (I’m not an Irving fan).

45. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins (Early Danielle Steele. How did this get on the list?

46. Anne of Green Gables - Lucy Maud Montgomery

47. Far From the Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy

48. The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood

49. The Lord of the Flies - William Golding (Lord, how I hated that book.

50. Atonement - Ian McEwan (what a perfect title)

51. Life of Pi - Yann Martel (this was one nutty book)

52. Dune - Frank Herbert

53. Cold Comfort Farm -- Stella Gibbons

54. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen

55. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth (I tried but just could not get into this gigantic fat book)

56. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

57. A Tale of Two Cities - Charles Dickens (It is a wonder there are any words LEFT for any of us to use)

58. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime - Mark Haddon

60. Love in the Time of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

61. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck 62. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

63. The Secret History - Donna Tartt

64. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold LOVED IT

65. The Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas

66. On the Road - Jack Kerouac

67. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy

68. Bridget Jones' Diary - Helen Fielding (How did this get on the list?)

69. Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie

70. Moby Dick - Herman Melville

71. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens

72. Dracula - Bram Stocker

73. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett

74. Notes From a Small Island - Bill Bryson

75. Ulysses -- James Joyce

76. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath

77. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome

78. Germinal - Emile Zola

79. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray

80. Possession - A.S. Byatt

81. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens

82. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell

83. The Color Purple - Alice Walker

84. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiquro

85. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert

86. A Fine Balance - Rohintin Mistry

87. Charlotte's Web - E.B. White

88. The Five People You Meet in Heaven - Mitch Albom

89. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

90. The Far Away Tree Collection - Enid Blyton

91. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad

92. The Little Prince - Antoine de Saint-Expury (I think everyone at college read this and thought it was SO DEEP. I thought it was SO STUPID)

93. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks

94. Watership Down - Richard Adams LOVED IT

95. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole

96. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute

97. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas

98. Hamlet - William Shakespeare (again, isn't this part of #14?)

99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl

100. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

I am embarrased to say there are some books here I have never heard of. It’s a UK list—but where is Mark Twain? Dick Francis? Jodi Picoult? J.D.Robb? Oxbow Incident? Red Badge of Courage? The Great Gatsby? All of the books Oprah reads?